What did you mod today?

Nicely done goshdogit!

I put a LH351D 4000K 90CRI in my A6. Measured 1552 lumens OTF. :sunglasses: Bought from led4power and was a 5 minute job. Tint is very even with a bit of green, colours pop nicely under it

I was inspired by thisnameisvalid and decided to rebuild my very first modded light, my A6!

I put in a Luxeon V2 4000K 70CRI (a 3535 package brand new LED). I think I got the first 10 available from DigiKey here

According to my shoebox I got 1,367lm turn on and 1,094lm at 30 seconds using a VTC6. I decided not to try my VTC5A yet in case I kill it.

I tried to measure amp draw but I think the thin tube on this A6 makes it hard to get good contact. I think it was ~6.5A on the same VTC6 after about 45s of turbo use. This is with a bypassed tail and blue small spring (no bypass) on driver side.

The beam is similar in tint to Luxeon V1 (the 4040 one) but exactly as you would expect, a bit more throwy and less power. Comparing it to a LH351D 4000K 90CRI I would say the Luxeon is MUCH more ‘rosy’, no hint of green, and just overall more white. However, i’m a little disappointed in the output. I expected something a lot closer to a LH351D as the datasheet and everything matches it very closely.

This week i’m going to build a Sofirn C8F with this LED and drive it as hard as possible (30T probably) and get a better tail reading.

Yeah. The die is quite a bit smaller than the one in the Luxeon V. It also has a smaller footprint, so can’t scale as well due to thermal limitations.

Yea just wishful thinking. The output is great either way and i’m pretty sure this will be my goto LED when i dont care about CRI and want a 3535 LED.

I put a “white flat” into a VG-10 style light.


I’m using a 3A buck driver for now. I plan to upgrade to a ~4.5-5A regulated driver at some point.

I used some UV set resin to narrow down an XP centering ring, then a small triangular file to open it up enough for the emitter.

I think there is probably still some focusing work I can do, but the first guess turned out pretty well. I don’t have decent beam shots. I can say that the diameter of hot-spot is just a little bigger (~10%) than that from a XP-L HI in my Convoy L2. At 3 amps, the output is lower, so the intensity is lower than the L2, but at higher current, they should be more comparable. Not bad for a light with a 23mm reflector.

CRX CuTi Triple Nichia 219C 4000K - 18350 - FET 17 - Fw Clicky Sw - 2100lm.

I always seem to run into some new problem every time I mod something. This time I either corrupted or erased the firmware on a new driver without noticing. Build up my light, nothing. Redo all connections, check for shorts, check e-switch, the whole nine yards. Then I think, hmm let me go to a different version of Anduril just in case. Bingo. Re flashed and all works fine. I thought in the back of my mind it flashed “too quickly” the first time but ignored it.

Anyways, as promised. I put a 3x Luxeon V2 4000K 70CRI in my C8F 21700

21700 VTC6A - not quite topped off

  • 0s 3,461 with 12.5-13A tail reading

21700 30T - just about fully topped off

  • 0s 3,792
  • 30s 3,019 (may have been throttling, not sure)

To put this into perspective I built a similar light with LH351D 4000K 90CRI and got 3,486 at 0s on a full 30T.

I couldn’t take a picture side by side and make the tints appear true to life, not sure why but the Luxeon V2 does feel closer to the BBL than the LH351D in that there is less green. It also looks like there is more intensity in the hot spot.

I have a pile of 4000k XM-L’s destined to replace the emitters in several older lights. First tried it on a crelant 7g5l2 that I hated, reflowed the LED successfully using a pizza pan on the stove with a thermal gun but could’t solder the leads with my 25 watt iron and ended up breaking leads. Later took a look at my broken rrt-3 jetbeam (burned out emitter) and with all of the space in there was tempted to give it a go. Reflowing the LED’s didn’t go so well, the uneven heat on the stove warped the mcpcb, and then again couldn’t get the leads to solder without having contact with the reflector. Argh.

Bought a proper weller soldering station and all of the supplies mentioned by texas ace in his videos, flux, solder, etc.

Tried to have a go assembling a convoy s2 with driver and mcpcb on the pill, failed and ended up unsoldering the components of the driver trying to solder it to the brass pill. Got everything back in its correct places (7135’s) but when assembled no light.

Took the whole thing back apart, watched another of his videos that I wish I’d had seen before I started, as it appears you need to heat up the pill before trying to solder it. I was getting cold solder joints, and getting it to solder made it hot enough to where things started coming apart.

So now have a temperure controlled electric griddle on its way, with a new (and much cheaper) driver, hope to have more luck and get my first assembly done but if i break it it will hurt less than the $17 driver i ruined…

Probably will pick up some solder projects from microcenter, need to work up my skills to where I’ll be comfortable replacing the leds on my tn30, tn31 maybe, tm11, and a few others.

Losing the rrt-3 really hurt because that was my first “real” flashlight back then and wasn’t exactly inexpensive…

CRX, that’s Cute. :slight_smile:

Cute and unique :+1:

Yes… It is no logical that beam is larger than xp-l hi.

But this is nice:

Where did you bought stencil?

I will have to play with the thickness more.

I cut it out of mylar using a ‘craft’ cutting plotter and gerber2graphtec.

I need to figure out how to cut a whole 8.5x11” sheet of them so I can do a give-away.

jimF, I feel for you. I’ve been soldering on and off since I was about 10. As an adult, I’ve gotten a lot better at it, but there are often times where it feels like I’m soldering for the first time.

  • A decent iron and tips are one of the things that really helped me, so good that you have that on the way.
  • One of the things you can do with a decent iron is turn it up when soldering to things that soak away heat quickly, like a copper MCPCB mounted in a light. ~20°C can make the difference between a thick, gloppy mess and a nice clean joint. Turn it down when you don’t need it that hot though, it’ll prolong the life of the tip.
  • Speaking of the tip, the ritual of cleaning and re-tinning it as you work really helps, especially when you are running it extra hot.
  • Good solder is also a huge help.
  • Tinning contacts and wires before making the joint also helps a lot. For example, tinning a brass pill before soldering the driver to it, or tinning the pads (actually, in this case, I do more than tin it, I make a little blob) on a MCPCB before mounting it on the light.
  • Extra flux really helps with rework, especially of older joints, but I often add a little before soldering leads I just tinned to a star I just tinned.

Unless there is something really odd about it, a replacement MCPCB for your jetbeam shouldn’t be too hard to arrange. Also, in general, DTP MCPCBs are pretty inexpensive. I rarely reuse old MCPCBs, and never if they are just non-DTP aluminum.

I put an Osram “White Flat” in my brand-new Olight M2X…
Now that’s a thrower ! Still not as powerful as my M3XS Black Flat but it DOES throw and is really compact :

Left before (XP-L HI), right after (White Flat).

Left M3XS Black Flat, right B158B White Flat

Your pics don’t show.

They showed earlier must be a permission thing he changed. I’m curious what the kcd numbers are for all of those. They all look pretty impressive (when the pics were up)

Should be ok now.
Sorry guys

:+1: freaking lasers

Beautiful pics. Could you please give us kcd numbers?

They would be estimations unfortunately, I still don’t have any luxmeter so I use the “ceiling bounce” android app.
I’ll do that soon